[rescue] Okay.. OS thoughts

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Monday, November 26, 2001 at 00:54:25 (-0500), Joshua D Boyd wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [rescue] Okay.. OS thoughts
>
> On Sun, Nov 25, 2001 at 10:42:36PM -0600, Bill Bradford wrote:
> > Machine doesent have a floppy drive, and I dont really intend to put
> > one in.. Does NetBSD have anything like a software RAID and/or
> > logging filesyste/softupdates yet?  If so, I may throw a couple of
> > large IDE drives in this beast and make it the home fileserver..
> 
> According to the documentation, NetBSD supports software raid, but I haven't 
> seen anything mentioned about logging filesystems or softupdates.  Haven't
> tried the software raid either.

Softupdates have been integrated into NetBSD releases since 1.5, and was
initially integrated on a kernel source branch back in Oct. 1999.  It's
been there so long now that the online NEWS file is too new to mention it.

The software RAID (based on CMU's RAIDframe) works wonderfully and has
been integrated much longer -- since 1.4.  It's also only about a
million zillion times more stable and reliable than the FreeBSD Vinum
crap[*].  Our main planix.com server has had RAIDframe for all of its main
storage for well over two years now, and I've been using it for /home on
my development server for quite a while now too (approximately
mid-summer).  (I have real hardware RAID for /cvs and /work though.)

I've been using softupdates on my development server since early this
summer too.  They do amazing things!  CVS flies with them!

In my opinion there has not yet been a really world-class modern NetBSD
release yet, but 1.6 will certainly be it.  With the combination of
softupdates and the new virtual memory system (UVM) and a properly
integrated, aka unified, I/O buffer cache (UBC) NetBSD's kernel
performance will meet or maybe even exceed that of FreeBSD (on the same
hardware), and perhaps even meet that of SunOS-5.7 or so (also on the
same hardware, of course).  NetBSD still won't have a 100% complete
zero-copy TCP implementation.  However NetBSD's networking stack and
interface drivers have had many other improvements that have kept it
right up on par with the best.  FreeBSD's netgraph stuff is really neat
and powerful stuff too, and hopefully it'll be ported to NetBSD, maybe
even in time for 1.6....  :-)


[*] I do have Vinum in use on a couple of biggish Squid servers running
FreeBSD (it stripes and makes reliable the /var partition under the
premise that I could run in degraded mode by simply pulling any disk and
rebooting).  Once I got it configured and running (no small feat -- I
spent two days getting it right and I doubt the procedure I documented
is repeatable because when I tried repeating it on the second machine I
had many troubles and had to rewrite it), it's been running fine since.
I've not dared test the failure handling though.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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